Sedition Trial Research Articles

Order and Disorder in the Court:Press Law, Politics, and the Sedition Trials of Chile's Early Republic, 1813–1851

AbstractThis article explores the phenomenon of the sedition trial in the early history of the Spanish American republics, focusing on sedition trials that occurred in Santiago de Chile from the late 1820s to the early 1850s. Sedition trials were governed by laws enacted in the wake of Chile's political independence to protect and regulate the freedom of the press. Because of the way press laws were written, sedition trials were conducted in front of juries composed of active citizens. As such, they constituted a dramatic break with the judicial tradition of Spanish colonial rule. The article argues that sedition trials were instrumental in the dynamics of political conflict, but only when the national government allowed them to operate without interference, which was not always the case. When sedition trials had integrity, as they did for a period in the 1840s, they became a public space in which citizen-journalists and publishers participated in establishing the boundaries of political speech. However, as one might expect, government officials also used the charge of sedition to silence their opponents. Sedition trials can thus be seen as a form of political warfare that has not been fully appreciated by scholars.

Foreword - The Great Canadian Sedition Trials: The Courts and the Winnipeg General Strike, 1919-1920, 2nd ed.

Foreword - The Great Canadian Sedition Trials: The Courts and the Winnipeg General Strike, 1919-1920, 2nd ed.

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Matthew T. Shifflett Antitheatricality and the Body Public. By Lisa A. Freeman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Cloth $59.95, Paper $29.95. 376 pages. In the heady days of the 1990s culture wars, my college mentors presented the history of antitheatrical thought as a grand historical struggle, as if there were an unbroken line from Plato/Ion to Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown. Central to this narrative was The Antitheatrical Prejudice, a 1981 book by Jonas Barish that took a philological approach to the matter, locating a fundamental "ontological queasiness" (Barish 3) in mimetic practices. Barish's book became the point of departure for the next generation's exploration of historical conflicts between performers and what Barish called the "unmistakably crackpot streak" of "hard-shelled, mole-eyed fanatics" (Barish 2). Lisa A. Freeman's Antitheatricality and the Body Public reins in some of the essentialist excesses that Barish's approach has inspired and points the way toward an even more urgent homology between the Jeremy Colliers and the Jerry Falwells: that their denunciation of dramatic representation is aimed at the legitimacy of sovereign authority itself. Antitheatricality and the Body Public uses well-known instances of anti-theatrical fervor in Anglo-American history as occasions for richly detailed analyses of what Barish dismissively called "local considerations" (Barish 4). Throughout, Freeman harnesses not just the strategies of theatre and performance studies, but also a deep fluency in the historiographical tools of cultural, intellectual, and legal histories. While each chapter offers a well-researched, persuasively-argued case, the cumulative force of the chapters illustrates a "repertoire" of antitheatrical rhetoric, replacing Barish's "ontological malaise" with an instrumental (and [End Page 174] performance-inflected) citationality. To read Freeman's book solely as a corrective to Barish would be to miss the book's more significant contribution: the articulation of a "body public" as a term that expands upon queer theorist Michael Warner's formulation of a "public" as an entirely discursive phenomenon. Warner's Publics and Counterpublics offered a crucial model for understanding the ways a "public" could be constituted and mediated through the participation of its constituents. However, Warner used theatrical audience only as a metaphor for how a public operates, as a totality witnessing itself in a shared visible space. Freeman shows the crucial role that "concrete, visible, and embodied forms" play in the dynamic by which discursive publics were articulated and challenged. Freeman's first chapter, on William Prynne, is a significant contribution on its own, and at eighty-five pages, it comprises nearly a third of the book. Freeman offers a close reading of Prynne's mammoth Histrio-Mastix, an obsessively thorough antitheatricalist tract from 1633. Freeman's reading goes beyond prior treatments by looking past an anachronistic binary between print and performance, showing instead how print worked performatively within Jacobean society and was understood as such. Freeman offers a careful, yet innovative, evaluation of the documents surrounding Prynne's Star Chamber trial for sedition. By comparing previously undiscovered manuscript sources, Freeman shows how the trial itself and the competing transcripts of the trial worked performatively to "create" the constituencies they purported to represent. The next three chapters reframe well-known controversies of the long eighteenth century as conflicts stemming from the divergence of public policies and practices from religious doctrine. Chapter 2 reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View… as a rebuke to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which replaced the Catholic James II with his Protestant cousin, William of Orange. In this reading, Freeman convincingly shows that Collier was notorious at the time for his Jacobite provocations, and that his antitheatrical views were an extension of that position. Moreover, the eventual absorption of Collier's critique by the public sphere transformed regressive provocation into forward-thinking debate, as William Congreve highlighted the stage's capacity as a social corrective. The third chapter situates John Home's Douglas and the debates it inspired among the rivalries between secularist Scottish enlightenment writers (with their general optimism about the human capacity for reason) and the more pessimistic view of human depravity found in Presbyterian orthodoxy. Freeman shows how a growing...

Defending the Defender: Gerald Winrod and the Great Sedition Trial

The Rev. Dr. Gerald B. Winrod, an evangelist based in Wichita, Kansas, viewed himself and his followers as defenders. He came to call his media and ministry organization the Defenders of the Faith and its flagship magazine, The Defender. From Winrod's view, the Defenders provided a moral bulwark against Darwinists, saloon keepers, women who wore revealing clothes, Catholics,sometimes, Jews, and especially Communists. At times, Winrod used very thin evidence to apply these labels to those he viewed as threats to American morality. For example, Winrod widely promoted his assertion that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was both a Jew and a Communist.1

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman W. B. Worthen ANTITHEATRICALITY AND THE BODY PUBLIC. By Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; pp. 376. Lisa Freeman's rich study Antitheatricality and the Body Public should take a privileged place alongside the most influential work in the field, ranging from synoptic literary studies like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981), to broadly sociological landmarks like Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (1976), and to historically localized studies like Martin Puchner's Stage Fright (2003). Freeman's book takes an alternative, case-study approach, as each of five detailed chapters traces a moment when some dimension of "theatre" broadly conceived provides the occasion to trace "major struggles over historical shifts in the nature and balance of discursive power and political authority" (2). While Freeman examines "the particular ways that the theater as both physical space and metaphorical realm" has been a "site of contestation for positing and projecting publics" (5), the emphasis here is largely on the latter: plays and performances, the stuff of making theatre, fall below a richly considered discursive horizon on which theatre figures as an instrument for contesting state sovereignty, for negotiating the role of religion, for tracing the legal standing of the state's patronizing of the arts. A theatrically inflected body public does emerge here, evolving practices of dissent, often dissent from the law, working along the interwoven axes of class, religious sect, race, gender, and sexuality. After a brief introduction, the first chapter treats an obligatory figure in the history of English anti-theatricalism, William Prynne, whose "vertiginous" (32) and massive Histrio-Mastix (1632) has long been regarded as an obsessive catalog of antitheatrical mania. Although it landed the author in jail when his comment "women actresses—notorious whores" was taken as a slander of Queen Henrietta Maria's performance of a speaking part in a court masque, Histrio-Mastix, in Freeman's deft reading, undertakes a searching inquiry into the theatricalized abuse of state power. Paying particular attention to Prynne's appropriation of the performative technology of print, she charts his outline of the consequences of the "growth of a theatrical body public, unmoored from either church or state and in possession of a distinct political consciousness" (43). Although the theatre images the antitype of a legitimate public, Prynne uses the "theatrical" rhetoric of acts and scenes, prologues and choruses to marshal the Calvinist community against the overweening power of the church episcopate, personified by Bishop Laud and Charles I. The centerpiece of the chapter is Freeman's meticulous reading of Prynne's trial for sedition, in which the government did not mount the charge of Puritanism (which would galvanize Prynne's low church support), appealing instead to the godliness of the sovereign's transcendent responsibility for the body politic. Freeman's brilliant analysis of trial records shows Prynne and the state vying to appeal to sovereignty over sect, claiming the same high ground of public-minded authority that gentlemen of the Inns of Court asserted in the public masque performed just prior to Prynne's trial, a performance distancing them from their sometime colleague. In the end, the charges against Prynne of libeling the king and the queen, and—more centrally—to being a "stirrer vpp of the people to disobedience" (12) were prosecuted: he was disbarred, fined, degraded at Oxford, had his ears clipped in the pillory, and was imprisoned for life; as the result of his second trial, his ears were again cropped and his cheeks branded, singed by the authority of a theatricalized state. In the second chapter, Freeman reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) not as a complaint against the scurrilous wit of Restoration drama, but instead as an indictment of the church's involvement—conspiring against the claims of the Catholic James II—in the Williamite Glorious Revolution, where Collier's animus against the satirical treatment of [End Page 423] clergy in Restoration drama is part of a wider animation against "levelling," the resistance to established forms of social and moral authority. In Freeman's hands, Collier...

Memorializing history in the Bombay High Court

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I show that the central courtroom of the Bombay High Court has been conserved as a site that memorializes the Court’s institutional history. The Court’s institutional history refers to the history as remembered and recollected by the judges, lawyers, court staff and different persons associated with the Court. The legal history of the Court identifies the law as documented in judgements, rules and regulations. The conflict between the institutional and legal histories of the Court is brought to the forefront in the case of the sedition trial of Tilak in the central courtroom of the Bombay High Court.

Sedition, Law, and the British Empire in India: The Trial of Tilak (1908)

This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked a fundamental discursive rupture in the history of empire and paved the way for mass anticolonial movements under the leadership of Gandhi.

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Susan Bennett Lisa A. Freeman. Antitheatricality and the Body Public. U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. 361 Pp. IT IS REMARKABLE THAT FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice (U of California P, 1981) has remained the definitive, go-to reference for scholars who wish to address or simply cite matters of antitheatricality. It is, therefore, a bold—but certainly timely— move by Lisa Freeman to analyze antitheatricality anew. She delivers on this task with a thorough and thought-provoking investigation realized in a compelling series of case studies that demonstrate the pervasiveness of antitheatrical onslaughts across theater history. She considers the “contentious discursive environment, political, religious, philosophical, literary, and dramatic,” in which antitheatricality is produced and understood, looking at both familiar and less well-known examples from “Anglo-American archives” (5–6). While the book is a must-read for researchers working on any period of British or American theater, she hopes that it might also be “a model for further research on the political and cultural significance of antitheatrical attacks in other nations, places, and states” (6). I am confident that scholars interested in those “other nations, places, and states” will find Freeman’s work productive and inspiring. Of most interest to early modernists, chapter 1 is a remarkably detailed interrogation of evidence related to the 1634 Star Chamber trial for sedition of William Prynne, author of the 1000-plus-page antitheatrical volume Histrio-Mastix. Freeman opens with James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace, a masque written as a repudiation of Prynne and his publication, performed at the Banqueting House for the King and Queen a mere four days before the trial began. As she persuasively demonstrates, the performance of 3 February 1634 started well before The Triumph of Peace addressed its audience at court: “a magnificent, torchlit procession filled the streets of London” and wowed crowds along its route from Chancery Lane to Whitehall Palace, led by “one hundred Gentlemen of the Inns of Court” and accompanied by pages, footmen, dancers, musicians, and four Roman-style chariots (each pulled by six horses) (11). For Freeman, the procession across the city made “popular cause” with its urban spectatorship, staging “a reciprocal interest in the power of the common law to curb monarchical overreaching” (22). The Triumph of Peace not only appeared to deliver a conventional “show of submission” to the king (30), but also addressed, “as a competing locus [End Page 155] of authority, judgment, and interpretation,” the gallery reserved for the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court located directly behind the royal party (29). Moreover, it was a pre-trial intervention equally directed to a reading public: three thousand copies “were printed ahead of time and made immediately available for sale. The masque became one of the most talked-about spectacles in London, and more copies had to be printed” (29). Freeman argues that the lawyers’ various strategies were effective in shaping public opinion, a concept “just beginning to emerge and to be recognized for its political and rhetorical efficacy” (30). Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix was another, if more protracted, attempt at shaping public opinion. As Freeman suggests, no critical account of such a massive and intricate text can realistically claim to be comprehensive, and thus she chooses to focus on “the practical concerns and rhetorical effects of the paratexts,” observing a “rhetorical dramaturgy of call and response” intended to persuade its readers to embrace “Calvinist proscriptions” (39). Through analysis of the different elements that structure the enormous volume, Freeman elucidates how and why the book was held seditious. Both The Triumph of Peace and Historio-Mastix serve as critical background to her scrutiny of records of the court proceedings. While these court proceedings have received significant scholarly attention, Freeman’s account has the advantage of a recently discovered manuscript, Eng 1359, the “most exhaustive account of the trial and what appears to come closest to a complete, though not necessarily official, transcript of the proceedings against Prynne” (63). This manuscript, held in Harvard’s Houghton Library, provided the author with “an unprecedented opportunity” to examine and illustrate “the distinct rhetorical posturings and...

Kah Seng Loh, Edgar Liao, Cheng Tju Lim, and Guo-Quan Seng. The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 347p., with bibliography and index.

The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity KAH SENG LOH, EDGAR LIAO, CHENG TJU LIM, and GUO-QUAN SENG Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 347p., with bibliography and index.This book examines the history of the University Socialist Club (USC) at the University of Malaya (later renamed as University of Singapore) from 1953 to 1971 within the broad context of British decolonization, the global Cold War, and the making of the modern nation-states of Singapore and Malaya(sia). It is a timely product because the only substantive works on this important subject are a 1973 unpublished BA graduating thesis (Koh 1973) and the recent firsthand accounts in The Fajar Generation as edited by three former USC members (Poh et al. 2010). Moreover, it arrives at an opportune moment when the authoritarian politics of Singapore appear to be changing, with untold stories and alternative narratives being offered through a multitude of platforms to challenge the dominant state narrative of the Singapore Story as framed primarily by the elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew.It is to the credit of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS, Singapore) to have provided the four young scholars with initial financial support and moral impetus to explore new ground in Singapore history (p. 12). It would have been even better if ISEAS had seen the project to its fruition and publication through its own internal publishing unit. Similarly, the authors have registered their share of difficulty in getting access to local primary source materials, especially government records, and their fresh archival findings were mostly excavated from foreign archives instead of the National Archives of Singapore (pp. 38-39). How they overcame these obstacles is testimony to the tenacity and skill of the history writing of the authors as they have indeed succeeded in putting together a volume rich in details and analysis.The main body of discussion begins with the reluctant British approval for forming a political club within the nascent university as well as the Fajar arrests and sedition trial which elevated the USC to its iconic political status. This is followed by several chapters delineating its activities to mobilize students across campuses in Singapore as well as those in Malaya and even among the international student fraternity. It was a mixed record of collaboration and contestation due to personality issues and ideological differences. The discussion also touches on the important divide as well as connectivity between the English-educated and Chinese-educated student activists. An introspective critique is then developed on how the intelligence and security agencies (especially the Special Branch which later morphed into the Internal Security Department), under the trope of international Cold War and local fear of communism and communalism, had constructed a problematic information order which became a primary tool for the emasculation of left wing politics. The next segment deals with the USC's involvement in the battle to merge and form Malaysia, the various security crackdowns, and the fight for university autonomy. The last substantive chapter on Entwined Memories and Myths brings the story to the present day by surfacing the claims and counter-memories of various actors on both sides of the political fence in their old age. …

Thomas Muir: Radicalism, Loyalism and Internationalism in the 1790s

This essay considers the 'political martyr' Thomas Muir as a representation of increased internationalism throughout late eighteenth century Scotland, when a veritable 'patriotic public sphere' developed in Britain. The relation of contemporary radical and loyalist political expressions to Muir's controversial trial for sedition has dominated the few examinations of him available, such as the biographies by Christina Bewley and Hector Macmillan. The unpublished work by George Pratt Insh, however, looked beyond this 'martyrdom' for a more nuanced approach that remains an invaluable source of international archive material. Muir's sentence of fourteen years transportation arose from a discursive realm that negotiated constitutional meanings, contested ideological borders and expressed both authoritarian and popular principles. Muir's conduct justified radical and loyalist rhetoric but also demonstrated his personal transformation from a distinct arena of 'Scottishness' to a more universal approach to politics. As Muir's life and the eighteenth century drew to a close, this transition provided an allegory for Scotland's role on the international stage as the modernisation process continued.

Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer (review)

Reviewed by: Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer Angela Fernandez Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer Mary Sarah Bilder, Maeva Marcus, & R R Kent Newmyer , EDS Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 287 US$85 (HB)* Kathryn Preyer passed away on 19 April 2005 at the age of eighty. 1 She was a teacher of American history in the history department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. 2 This book is a collection of her essays, published between 1962 and 1992, put together by those who knew and loved her and had the deepest respect for her work on the early national period in America. The book itself is a testament to that affection and admiration, which comes shining through in the preface, the general introduction by Stanley Katz, and the introductory essays by each of the three editors. The book is divided into three sections - none of which, it must be said, deals with Blackstone. The first, introduced by Maeva Marcus, editor of the Documentary History of the United States Supreme Court and past president of the American Society for Legal History, contains four essays focused on the role of the judge in the early national period. Most of these pieces were written in the 1960s and were based on Preyer's doctoral dissertation on the Judiciary Act of 1801 (when she was Kathryn Turner) (7). The first essay 3 gives a sense of Preyer's style and methodology. It begins with a description of the federal Judiciary Act of 1789 and the limited jurisdiction given to federal courts. When a lame-duck Federalist Congress expanded federal jurisdiction under the Judiciary Act of 1801, it was not in response to the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, as is commonly supposed. In fact, Federalists had begun planning to expand federal jurisdiction as early as 1799. Their intention related to their fear that state legislatures and state courts would side with settlers when determining rights involved in large land [End Page 536] purchases (rather than with out-of-state speculators like the Federalists themselves) and also to their desire to expand the criminal jurisdiction of federal courts, their wish for effective tax collection, and their interest in policing sedition (29-37). In other words, the causes of enactment were multi-factorial. Political defeat gave 'a driving urgency' to the desire to pass the statute; it did not, however, occasion it (38). This is a good example of a technique Preyer frequently used: explaining the standard account and how that account was overly simplistic and then offering a correction. In another piece, 4 she explains why the sedition trial of James T Callender was not just 'a way station' to the better-known story of the impeachment of Samuel Chase (92). Another looks into who 'the midnight judges' were, 5 the Federalists John Adams rushed to put in place on the eve of Jefferson's election, pointing out that they were political moderates rather than rabid anti-Republicans (89). To my mind, the stand-out essay in this group and the one that would appeal to a wide audience is Preyer's piece on the appointment of John T Marshall to the United States Supreme Court. 6 Preyer somehow manages to make this suspenseful despite the fact that we can hardly say we do not know where it is going. This, it seems to me, is one of the hallmarks of a great historian, to be able to tell an engaging story that highlights the contingency of events, how what happened is not what had to happen. The second set of essays, introduced by R Kent Newmyer, relate to the criminal law in post-revolutionary America and come from a later period of Preyer's career, the 1980s. The third and last of these pieces, 'Jurisdiction to Punish: Federal Authority, Federalism, and the Common Law of Crimes in the Early Republic' is in direct conversation with Newmyer's own work on United States Supreme Court judge Joseph Story. 7 This is an incredibly helpful essay for anyone seeking to understand the American controversy over the federal common-law jurisdiction over crimes. Not surprisingly, a historical inquiry reveals that...

Bishop in the Dock: The Sedition Trial of James Liston in New Zealand - By Rory Sweetman

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 35, Issue 2 p. 296-299 Bishop in the Dock: The Sedition Trial of James Liston in New Zealand – By Rory Sweetman PETER SALAMONSEN, PETER SALAMONSEN Independent Scholar, SydneySearch for more papers by this author PETER SALAMONSEN, PETER SALAMONSEN Independent Scholar, SydneySearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 May 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2010.01011.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume35, Issue2June 2011Pages 296-299 RelatedInformation

William Blake's Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis (review)

Reviewed by: William Blake's Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis Mark Lussier (bio) G.E. Bentley Jr. William Blake's Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis. Edwin Mellen. liv, 298. US$119.95 Perhaps no other scholar has made as lasting a contribution to the material conditions and contexts of Blake studies than G.E. Bentley Jr, who has spent a distinguished and productive career documenting virtually every aspect of Blake's life and work (e.g., in the indispensable Blake Records) and analyzing the significance of the gathered information (e.g., in the splendid biography Stranger from Paradise). William Blake's Conversations provides a fine supplement to the prior work, especially since it continues Dr Bentley's tendency of offering extremely useful reference works for any critical undertaking. As Mary Lynn Johnson succinctly states in her foreword, 'By gathering all known records of Blake's oral remarks, making each word accessible in a concordance, and subjecting the whole to a provocative rhetorical analysis, Professor Bentley has performed a significant scholarly service.' While only fifty or so of Blake's contemporaries recorded his voice in script, the spirited tone of utterance, as Bentley suggests in his in-depth introduction, will only confirm past impressions of the painter/poet/prophet as 'brilliant and bold, profound and perverse, eloquent and enchanting, idiosyncratic and wise.' As presented in the primary section of the work ('Thus Spake William Blake'), Bentley covers an impressive span of Blake's life (from 1767 to [End Page 427] 1831), although as this temporal range indicates, the earliest impressions are offered by those repeating his own recollections while the later are offered by those reporting after the fact his final passage to eternity. Bentley has chosen a rather broad definition of conversations to include memorable fancies from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and depositions for his trial for sedition, which in general works well. However, while the impetus for inclusion is admirable, the broad range itself becomes occasionally problematic. For example, I and other Blake critics have tended to read the 'I' of The Marriage as characterized and dramatized to achieve certain textual and narratological ends, rather than simply tracing Blake's tendency of speaking with the eternals resident in thought; thus, the presence of the dinner-party conversation with Isaiah and Ezekiel in a 'Memorable Fancy' seems inherently problematic. Otherwise, the broad parameters of the book provide an exemplary widened context within which to gauge the reception of Blake's words and acts. The materials gathered manifest an admirable hyper-organization designed to offer maximum benefit for subsequent scholarship, and Bentley's analytic prose, primarily on display in his superb introduction, reflects as well an engaging style both welcoming and, upon occasion, self-deprecating. The largest section for the book, for example, is taken up by a concordance of all included conversations, which will be of obvious use to scholarly endeavours, but Bentley also explores the play of language, in appendices dedicated to 'Blake's Imperfect Rhymes' and a 'Table of Rhyme Sounds,' that connect the public and private dimensions of a complicated and eccentric conversationalist. As well, the introduction unfolds in thirteen interrelated yet nonetheless discrete thematic subsections - from 'The Tao of Blake' to 'Descriptions of Blake as a Conversationalist' - to allow rapid progress toward a sought scholarly end. For this reason, among many others, Bentley's William Blake's Conversations will join his other foundational works in exerting an enabling influence on future research and generating admiration by those who follow where Blake's conversations lead. Mark Lussier Mark Lussier, Department of English, Arizona State University Copyright © 2010 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Interview with Suzy Post

Suzy former is the Post only president (born surviving 1933) of the plaintiff is an Kentucky icon of of the the Civil historic modern Liberties lawsuit civil Union rights that resulted (KCLU), struggle. in Post The the former president of the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union (KCLU), Post is the o ly surviving plai tiff f the historic awsuit t a r sulted n th 1975 busing plan to desegregate the Jefferson County and Louisville public school systems. The mother of five school-aged children at the time, Post was the only white parent who signed on to this legal challenge, and she helped monitor the implementation of the courts ruling when she served as program director for the Louisville-Jefferson County Human Relations Commission. For nearly half a century, Post has been a tireless and outspoken advocate for civil, women's, and LGBT rights, fair housing, and other social justice issues. I first met Post in the fall of 2004, when I helped to launch the Long Civil Rights Movement oral history project through the Southern Oral History Program as a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a four-hour interview at her Louisville home, Post invited me to be her guest at the annual dinner of the Kentucky Alliance, a coalition of grassroots political organizations working on a variety of social justice campaigns in Louisville. It was there that I met Anne Braden, the legendary civil rights activist who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mentioned by name in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, and who, along with her husband and several others, was tried for sedition (the charges were later dropped) in the now infamous 1954 trial during the height of Joseph McCarthys anti-Communist campaign. The Braden sedition trial was an important

J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: fbi Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945. By Douglas M. Charles. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. x, 197 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-1061-1. CD-ROM, $9.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-9140-5.)

In J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists Douglas M. Charles uses newly released Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) files to study with great precision the collaboration between the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and J. Edgar Hoover's fbi in a campaign to surveille, discredit, and, in a few cases, prosecute fdr's isolationist critics between the August 1939 outbreak of war in Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Charles provides new insights and a wealth of information on what the historian Leo Ribuffo has felicitously called the “brown smear,” efforts by a broad coalition of interventionists to discredit isolationism by associating it with a supposed Nazi “fifth column” in the United States. The campaign culminated in that summa of the brown smear, John Roy Carlson's best seller of 1943, Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, and a sensational sedition trial of “fifth columnists” in 1944. Charles examines the fbi investigations of Charles Lindbergh; the America First Committee; senators Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and David Walsh; and Congressman Hamilton Fish. He argues that in none of those cases did the fbi have sufficient grounds to conduct criminal investigations, although it might be argued that the Bureau had reason to investigate how Nazi propaganda had been sent under the congressional frank of some of those isolationist congressmen. Many investigations have been launched with less to go on than that, and, as Martin Luther pointed out, in law as in farming it is all a matter of whose ox is gored.

New Information Concerning Mrs Enoch, William and Catherine Blake's 'Fellow Inhabitant' at 17 South Molton Street

ON 14 January 1804, shortly after returning to London from his trial for sedition at the Epiphany Quarter Sessions at Chichester, William Blake wrote a letter to his patron William Hayley. From his two-room apartment on either the first or second floor of 17 South Molton Street, Oxford Street in the parish of St George, Blake wrote: My poor wife has been near the Gate of Death as was supposed by our kind & attentive fellow inhabitant. the young & very amiable Mrs Enoch. who gave my wife all the attention that a daughter could pay to a mother but my arrival has dispelld the formidable malady & my dear & good woman again begins to resume her health & strength –1 1 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, new rev. edn, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982) (hereinafter referred to as E), 740. 2 See Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (London, 1945), 175; Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake (Oxford, 1971), 204; G. E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise; A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London, 2001), 260; G. E. Bentley, Blake Records: Second Edition (New Haven and London, 2004) (hereinafter referred to as BR 2), n; 750. 3 G. E. Bentley Jr has suggested the possibility of a connection between the presence of Mrs Enoch and Blake's separate lithograph of Enoch, c. 1807 (see BR 2, 750).

Prosecution and radical discourse during the 1790s: The case of the Scottish sedition trials

This essay looks at the sedition trials in Scotland during the 1790s to examine how prosecution was exploited by radicals as a forum for political expression. As the government instituted a concerted campaign against radical activism, an increasing number of reformers faced trial on sedition and treason in this period. The courtroom emerged as an alternative venue for political discourse and this essay will explore some of the ways by which radicals challenged the dominant discursive and performative elements of trial proceedings.

A distant shore: Irish migration and New Zealand settlement. Edited by Lyndon Fraser. Pp 196. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. 2000. NZ$39.95 paperback. - Bishop in the dock: the sedition trial of James Liston. By Rory Sweetman. Pp viii, 327. Auckland: University of Auckland Press. 1997. NZ$39.95 paperback.

A distant shore: Irish migration and New Zealand settlement. Edited by Lyndon Fraser. Pp 196. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. 2000. NZ$39.95 paperback. - Bishop in the dock: the sedition trial of James Liston. By Rory Sweetman. Pp viii, 327. Auckland: University of Auckland Press. 1997. NZ$39.95 paperback.

Bishop in the Dock: The Sedition Trial of James Liston [Book Review

Review of: Bishop in the Dock: The Sedition Trial of James Liston. Rory Sweetman, AUP, Auckland, 1997, $39.95.

"Rex v. Blake": Sussex Attitudes toward the Military and Blake's Trial for Sedition in 1804

"Rex v. Blake": Sussex Attitudes toward the Military and Blake's Trial for Sedition in 1804